Golem.de talked to Fabian Franz and Kurt Pfeifle. NX, developed by the NoMachine aims for nothing less than to revolutionize network computing. The software allows to connect and work on remote desktops even across low bandwidth links such as ISDN or modems.

FreeNX, presented as a preview
during LinuxTag2004 by Fabian Franz (Knoppix Developer) and
Kurt Pfeifle (KDE Project), is a Free Software NX Server based
on the GPL'd libraries from NoMachine. After the aKademy week (where for
nine days more than 400 KDE contributors and visitors plan to
work on the next generation KDE) Fabian and Kurt plan to
release a first snapshot of the FreeNX server under the GPL
license for the first time. During aKademy, a few KDE hackers
are working on the integration of an NX Client into the KDE
framework. Knoppix-3.6 also will contain a first preview on
FreeNX. Golem.de, a German
IT news site talked to Fabian and Kurt just before aKademy.
Daniel Molkentin provided us with a translation.

At LinuxTag the two of
you showed off your free NX implementation which will also be
included into the next Knoppix version...

Fabian Franz: It wasn't only
Kurt and myself - at least four people were involved ;-)

KDE's Joseph Wenniger developed the first kNX/FreeNX client,
assisted by Torsten Rahn.

Out part was to get the FreeNX Server running.

Kurt Pfeifle: The actual
code of the FreeNX server was written by Fabian alone....

We basically showed two components at LinuxTag:

the FreeNX Server and

the FreeNX/kNX Client.

Only the interaction of both pieces allows remote GUI
connections even over "slow" physical links. Even with
low-bandwith techniques like an analogue modem or ISDN, both,
NX and FreeNX achieve a good performance -- even across
operating system borders. A very verbose description on the NX
interna can be found at: Pro-Linux
(german).

Fabian Franz: In fact, our
FreeNX implementation is only the last piece of the mosaic.
99,9% comes from NoMachines's GPL/NX components,
that we simply use unchanged in FreeNX.

Gian Filippo Pinzari developed the core in several years of
meticulous work. These are the NX components which his company
NoMachine.com offeres as Free and Open Source software under
the terms of the GPL (link?). The exactly same components used
in the commercial products of
NoMachine. NoMachine currently offers several commerical NX
server variants (Personal, Small, Business and Enterprise)
which base on the Free NX libraries.

If NX was already put
under the GPL in March 2003, why did it take more than a year
until a Free version of NX was published?

Kurt Pfeifle: In the last 15
months, there have been servere misunderstandings concerning
the whole NX software, which was considered to be "non-Free" by
several Open Source developers, just because NoMachine also
based its
commercial products on top of it.

Without having a deeper look, rejecting NX as "practically
unusable, if only the libraries are released under the GPL
whereas the NoMachine NX Server remains proprietary". These
biases simply overlooked, that a commandline tool was shipped
by NoMachine almost from the beginning, including the source code which
allowed everyone who was interested to build an completely
working NX tunnel.

Fabian Franz: I first saw
the commerical NX version with my own eyes at CeBIT 2004, when
Kurt showed it to me. I was immediately impressed. But even
when I saw Kurt's very simple "nxtunnel" shell script (which
didn't include a "server" functionality, but only merely
provided a peer-to-peer NX proxy tunnel) I didn't instantly
start to write the FreeNX code. First my laptop display had to
break and die, before NX became a personal necessity. to me.
With a broken display but without money for a quick repair, the
only help was to access the machine via NX. That was the final
kick for starting to code on FreeNX...